Nothing to Lose But My Life (16 page)

She was insistent about it, I thought. I said, “You maybe. I’m staying.”

Tanya said in a patient tone, “Lowry, I told you that in the past fourteen hours a lot has happened. And it has. Perly and Jake and Emmett were in that car following us down the Slope. It went over the cliff.”

So she had learned that. I said, “I’m not crying.”

“Emmett came out alive,” she went on. “A missing tooth and a bruise on his chin. He told the police that you and I deliberately shot the driver and sent the car over the edge. So we’re not just murderers, Lowry. We’re butchers.”

I said, “You too now?”

“Me, too.”

“Then you go to Mexico,” I said. “Let Nikke ship you out, but don’t look for him to join you. Because I’m staying and cleaning up this mess and Nikke is the part of it that needs cleaning the most. You go, but don’t expect me to go with you and spend the rest of my life sweating every time I see a cop or a tough tourist who looks like a Syndicate man. No thanks.”

“Bitter. Still bitter,” Tanya murmured.

“Five years of it inside me,” I reminded her. I shook thinking about it. “Hoop got away. Nikke won’t be so lucky.”

Tanya didn’t answer, but I was wound up and didn’t need any encouragement. I let it come out. “Perhaps I should thank Nikke for taking us in last night. I do thank him—for you. But remember that he didn’t do it for me. Anymore than he’d send me to Mexico to save my neck. Hell, no. He wants your safety. And down there, I’d be off his neck.”

She said, “When was a better chance to get you off than last night? You were out cold. All he had to do was take you and plant you somewhere for the police to find. Anywhere.”

I was too angry to think clearly. Besides, I was light-headed. Her logic didn’t even slow me down. I realized that I had a fever and that I felt lousy because whatever painkilling drug I had been given was wearing off. Realizing that made me madder—being doped when I couldn’t protest.

I said, “Nikke’s devious. How in hell do I know why he let me live this long? But let me ask the questions. When he had Travis get my stuff from the motel safe, how much did he leave me?”

“Everything. Your envelopes. The money. There’s over fifty thousand dollars in your bag, Lowry.”

I said, feeling triumphant, “And those photographs of you?”

“Those were mine. I took them and burned them.”

In my fuzzy state, it seemed to me that I had her on the run now. I said, “Who was the man in them, Tanya? Who was the man you killed?”

She slowed the car until it seemed as if we were crawling. “My husband, Bill Mace.”

“Blackmail,” I said. “You were being blackmailed with them, weren’t you?”

“In a way—yes.”

I crowed in triumph. “Then if Nikke thinks so damned much of you, why did he let that go on happening?”

“I told you. Nikke isn’t the Syndicate. The Syndicate has the negatives. What could he do?”

“Bleed you,” I said. “Make you work for him like he has.”

“Work for him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why else would you have kept on my tail like you did, done what you did? Except to keep me out of Nikke’s hair.”

She didn’t even bother to answer me but swung the car off the highway, up a gravel road and finally onto a flat mesa that looked out over the valley and the city toward the ocean. There was a stone outdoor fireplace and a couple of wooden benches and tables. It was a public picnic park. We had it to ourselves.

Tanya reached into the rear and came up with a big sack. She drew a can of beer, still sweating, from it. She opened the can and handed it to me. I drank, letting the beer run free down my throat until it threatened to start back up. It was still cold and my throat was hot. I began to feel a little better. Tanya dug some more and got me a sandwich. I ate that and drank more beer. I had three cans in all.

When the sack was empty, we lit cigarettes and stared at one another in silence. The moon had reached us and it touched Tanya briefly across her eyes and nose and full, warm mouth. I started to shake again but not from anger this time.

“God, you’re stubborn, Lowry.”

“And you know why,” I told her. “The only thing for me to do is go find who killed Hoop. Until I do that, I damned well won’t let Nikke use you to lure me down to Mexico. Do you like being that kind of bait, Tanya?”

“For Nikke, yes.” She was very quiet. She put out her cigarette and folded her hands in her lap. She looked resigned, as if she had just made an unpleasant decision. I had never seen Tanya quite this way before. It was a little frightening.

I said, “For Nikke! You still feel that way about him after what happened—between us?”

“I’ll always feel that way about him, Lowry. He’s my father.”

I HAD
promised to listen to Nikke for ten minutes before I made up my mind to do anything to him. Now I wouldn’t need to keep that promise. I listened to his daughter instead.

It took Tanya more than any ten minutes. She spoke rapidly once she was started, in a low, steady voice. She didn’t look at me often but I didn’t need to watch her face to know that what she said was the truth. I heard it all and when she was through, I got up and walked out. I couldn’t face her.

Nearly six years ago the Syndicate had moved in on Nikke. They had done it the easy way, not working on Nikke directly but on his daughter. Tanya was Nikke’s secret pride and joy. He had been only eighteen when she was born, the result of a spontaneous and deeply felt love affair. Her mother had died. Nikke took the girl and left his home and went elsewhere. He did a bit of everything to make money, to see that Tanya had the things money could buy.

He didn’t keep her with him. When she was very small, he sent her to the United States, to an uncle, and sent money, a great deal of money as he got wise to the ways of making it.

When Nikke himself had to run, it was only natural that he run to the United States. He was a well-to-do man with investments in America by this time. But he really knew only one business well—that of gambling. He settled in Puerto Bello and started his club and because he was honest, actually little more than a provider of entertainment to his well-heeled clientele, he was accepted and protected.

Tanya did not even know that her father was still alive. She got her money from a trust fund and, in addition, she made her own living. She had gone through college and become a designer of exclusive dresses in Beverly Hills. She had plenty of friends, men and women both, but she had never found anyone she cared to be really intimate with, certainly no man she wanted to marry.

Then the Syndicate stepped in. It wasn’t any big deal at first. It was a little outfit run by Jake, a local County outfit sniping at the edges of things. But after Nikke established himself, Jake had his one big idea. He wanted a piece of what Nikke had. It didn’t take too smart a man to realize that to move in and drive Nikke out would be killing the egg-laying goose. The only solution was to keep Nikke as a front, use his reputation and establish some dives with that as a screen. Only Nikke wouldn’t play.

Jake went down to L.A. and laid it on the line with some friends he had there. They went to work and did what my detectives couldn’t do—they checked Nikke so thoroughly they came up with Tanya.

Then I heard one of the things I wanted to hear. Jake’s friends had played it wise and gone to a young, up-and-coming behind-the-scenes string-puller. That was Charles Conklin, a fairly well-to-do stock and bond salesman who was just starting an organization of his own. Conklin had brains; Jake and his friends were smart enough to know they needed a man with brains.

With Charles Conklin was a high-priced lady-killer, Bill Mace. Tanya was twenty-six, successful, beautiful and, although she did not realize it, lonely. Mace had money and he displayed it in a quiet, well-bred way. They met first in Mexico where Tanya had gone to pick up some design ideas.

Mace was clever and smooth. He didn’t rush things. It was over a year before they were married. Nikke had an eye kept on Tanya for him but Mace fooled even his operatives. He never stepped out of character, he was always the rich, smooth playboy. But after he and Tanya were married, things changed.

The newly formed Syndicate was now ready to move. Only Mace crossed them up. He fell for Tanya. With her money and what he had stashed away chasing hungry widows, he figured that he and Tanya could live on their own. He told her his part of the deal.

That’s how she found out about Nikke being her father.

Now the Syndicate had to move and move fast. The first thing Mace knew, he had a drunk-driving rap hung on him. Then the “victim” died and it was manslaughter. Hearing it made me think of the frame on Jen. The pattern had worked once so they tried it a second time. I hoped there wouldn’t be a third.

The Syndicate sprung Mace, told him to jump his bail, arranged passage for him to Central America. They even had it fixed, they told him, for Tanya to join him. He was in so deep, he couldn’t do much but accept. Either that or spend twenty years in prison. He followed their orders.

When Mace disappeared, Tanya got the news that he had gone south and that he wanted her. She even got a letter ostensibly from him, telling her that the whole thing was a frame-up and could she come to him. He had proof she could take back with her. Tanya was a loyal person and she loved her husband.

She was careful about it and, she thought, clever. She got a plane to a different Central American country and then went by car to where he was waiting. When she looked back, she realized that it had been too easy to escape the police. The Syndicate had helped.

She found Mace all right; she found him dead. She walked in on him and into a crude but satisfactory frame. Before the two boys who were waiting for her had finished, she looked as if she had been beaten up by Mace and had taken revenge by sticking a knife into him. Those photos I’d seen were two of the number that they took.

It was crude but not too crude for the unsophisticated country where they were. The police came and they found Tanya “passed out” over her husband’s body, her hand on the knife, empty liquor bottles around. A few words of explanation to the police from the “friend” who had discovered the scene and the solution was obvious—Tanya had come to help her husband, found that he was truly a murderer. She had tried to leave him, they had fought. She killed him.

The Syndicate had chosen its country and policemen well. The news never reached the papers. The records of the crime disappeared without a trace. So did Tanya and Bill Mace. When she got back to the States, she found herself confronted with photostatic copies of police records and glossy, detailed photographs. Mace himself was in the Pacific somewhere, far down on the bottom. There was even an affidavit from the man she supposedly hired to put him there.

Tanya did the only thing she could think of. She went to Nikke. And that was what they’d been waiting for. Nikke sent her back to L.A., to take up her former life, to do what she could to make things appear the same on the surface. Meanwhile, he would put up all the fight he could.

It wasn’t much. They had his every move blocked before he made it. They gave him a choice—go on fighting and have his daughter’s crime splashed on every paper in the country or give in gracefully. Nikke gave in.

Tanya couldn’t take it. She gave up her business. Nikke refused to let her come to him; he couldn’t make himself believe that she would approve of his way of making a living. She tried travel; she tried a little house in the country. Nothing worked. Two years ago she threw the whole thing over and came to Nikke anyway.

And the Syndicate took advantage of that. Neither Nikke nor Tanya had broadcast their relationship. The Syndicate saw a further use for her. They forced her to make a play for Hoop. She was in the same boat as Nikke; she had no choice.

When all the groundwork was laid, the Syndicate moved itself to Puerto Bello. And their investment began to pay off. Nikke was a fine front. Conklin kept in the background as he always had, but he wasn’t just a quiet partner. With Puerto Bello ripe for plucking, he made it his business to pluck. First, he sized up Hoop and moved in on him.

He broke Hoop and then saw to it that he recouped. Before Hoop knew what was happening, he and Conklin were partners. Then Hoop began to get a little big for his straight jacket. He was as good a crook as the next man, but the way the Syndicate worked wasn’t his way. He tried to rebel. That’s when they turned Tanya loose on him. At the same time, they put other squeezes on him where it hurt—mentioned certain stock deals he had made, small things and big ones, but all together they made an ugly record. And then, of course, there was what he had done to me and the others he had fleeced.

He hadn’t done all the fleecing but the records were set up to make it look so. Conklin was no man to miss a bet.

And so now I knew. I knew that it wasn’t Nikke who had forced me to take the case that caused my disbarment. It wasn’t Nikke who had tried to build around my wife the same kind of frame that had caught Bill Mace. Nor was it Nikke who had taken advantage of Hoop when he was on the rocks and forced him into refusing me money. Not any of it could I honestly lay at Nikke’s feet, and only part of it at the Colonel’s.

I didn’t blame Nikke, not now. He had had his choice—sacrifice me and himself or sacrifice Tanya. And he dared not tell me, no more than he dared tell the police. The Syndicate had him tied no matter which way he might turn.

It was strange, I thought. I’d spent five years hating Nikke and hating Hoop and now that hatred was so much dust in my mouth. I should hate the Syndicate. But I couldn’t. Even knowing that Conklin was at its head, I couldn’t hate them. Not in the way I had hated Nikke and Hoop. There was something too impersonal about the Syndicate. It was Emmett—who had taken the photographs of Bill Mace’s body and of Tanya and who had killed Mace; it was Jake—who had thought it up in the first place; it was Perly—who took care of the rough stuff; it was a handful of unnamed gunsels such as those at the club on the highway, and it was Conklin—whose brain directed it all. And yet it wasn’t anyone. No one definite enough for me to hate.