Primed for Murder (27 page)

On the way home, still in coveralls, he stopped at an Italian restaurant to linger over dinner: antipasto, tossed salad, lasagna and garlic bread, all lovingly prepared and leisurely presented by courses as if time meant nothing. Over a three-hour period, he sopped up a bottle of Chianti and topped off the satisfying meal with a dish of spumoni.

That did the trick. Wiped everything right away.

No Colangelos.

No Puterbaughs.

No Giambis.

No cops or robbers, no mobsters or murderers or manuscripts.

Feeling full, content and pleasantly high, Toby considered taking in a movie. There were several blockbuster action pictures playing around town. He’d see how alert he felt once he’d had a shower.

It was 8:30 by the time Toby left the restaurant and cruised north up Old Liverpool Road. On his left, the low hanging sun, huge and hazy behind smog, turned Onondaga Lake’s polluted waters to gold. Shadows of trees zebra-striped the ground as Toby parked in front of the garage at his Buckley Road residence. He keyed the front door lock and walked inside, flicking a switch to light up the dark house.

As the bulb illuminated the living room, his heart stalled and breath caught in his throat. Artie, dressed as he’d been a few hours earlier, waited on the couch. He lifted the long barrel of a silenced pistol as Toby came in.

Toby stood as though paralyzed, considering options. There were none. “What are you doing here? How’d you find me?”

Artie stood and glided nearer, the gun bore pointed steadily at Toby’s stomach. His dark eyes glittered. “Turn around. Grab the wall.”

Toby did as ordered. The gun jabbed his spine. “What’s this about?”

“You know what it’s about.” Artie patted Toby’s pockets.

“No, I—” A painful prod shut him up.

“You lied to me. Your name’s not Tom Smith. It’s Toby Rew.”

There went his keys, his wallet. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Dezi told me.” Great: another woman had betrayed him.

His driver’s license, with the photo in which Toby scowled like a drugged-out career criminal, was thrust in front of his face. “Doesn’t matter who you are,” Artie said.

“All that matters is that you’re the guy saw me kill that Mexican.”

“I didn’t really see you, Artie, just someone with your general build.”

“I hear you called me stocky.”

“I said the man appeared stocky. Could have been anyone.”

“Could’ve been anybody, but it happened to be me.”

“Don’t tell me! I’ll forget about it.”

“No, you won’t. I won’t, either.” Artie studied Toby’s license photo again and pocketed the wallet.

Another change of subject was called for, and quick. “What happened to Dezi?” Toby asked.

“What do you think happened?”

“You killed her?”

Artie craned to peer into Toby’s face. He looked genuinely puzzled. “Are you nuts? Why would I do a stupid thing like that? Dezi’s old man would go ballistic. Probably chop me into little pieces and feed me to his pet fishes.” The hard barrel found his backbone again. “I did smack her around a little where it wouldn’t show, to make it look good. She’s plenty mad at me for busting in on her and Mark. I got the photos I need to balance the scales with her dad. Shutterbug and lover-boy have been paid off. They’ll keep their mouths buttoned.”

Artie ground the gun to emphasize his next words. “Now it’s just you to worry about.”

“You don’t have to worry.” Toby’s voice fluted. “I won’t say jack.”

“Too late. You already blabbed to the cops.”

“What are you going to do?” Toby tensed for the bullet, already tasting copper in his mouth. He hoped he wouldn’t feel the slug.

“What do you think I should do?” There was a metallic quality in Artie’s voice.

“Let me go?” Toby’s voice broke.

“Can’t do that.” Artie’s manner softened. “You seem like a right guy. But wrong place, wrong time—too bad.” The steel finger at his back slid up to the base of Toby’s skull. “I’ll make it quick.”

“Wait! Think, Artie.” Toby clutched at a glimmering thought. “Who told your wife to hire me?”

“Who cares?” The click of a hammer being pulled back sounded as loud and as final as a crypt door slamming shut.

“You should. Don’t you think it’s strange the guy who saw you kill that man at the Puterbaugh’s ends up painting your house?”

“Puterbaugh’s wife probably told Dezi about you. They’re old buddies.” He patted Toby’s shoulder with his free hand. “Nice try.”

“But what if it was somebody else? Like your father-in-law?”

Artie didn’t say anything for what seemed like an eternity. “Won’t sweat it, now I got the photos I need. Bye, pal.”

“Before you shoot, one thing you ought to know.” Toby played his next-to-last last card. “Cops have your home phones bugged. I know: I did the bugging.”

Artie kept quiet for a half-minute. “Office phone, too?”

Another few precious seconds of life gained. “Right. So if you’ve done business over the line lately, they know about it.”

Artie fell silent, thinking. “Nope, I’ve only used throwaway cell phones the last few weeks. I’ll mention it to Mr. G, though, and maybe that will keep me in good with him. Thanks for the info.”

Toby tossed out his final trump. “While you’re at it, better tell Mr. Giambi I have evidence stashed away about the stolen manuscript the Puterbaughs brought him from Mexico. Anything happens to me, the cops get it and he’ll be in trouble.”

Another long moment of silence, another brief bonus period of existence, divided into individual nanoseconds of acute awareness. “You know,” Artie said, with a brassy edge to his voice, “you’re becoming a real pain in the ass, buddy.”

A million stars suddenly went supernova inside Toby’s head.

Brilliant colors flared in all directions and raced away at the speed of light, leaving only blackness behind.

Chapter 23

I’m dead, Toby thought.

His eyes were open. Everything was inky dark. Was he in a coffin? They must be carrying his body to the cemetery. He felt movement. Odd: he’d always believed you couldn’t feel anything once you were dead. So why did he have a splitting headache?

Toby realized he was lying on his side, wrists behind him, knees bent: a funny way to lay somebody in a casket. The top of his throbbing head rested against something hard, but with give to it. He straightened his legs and his feet contacted with a dull thud against metal. His arms, tied, wouldn’t budge. He smelled rubber, gas fumes and dust. He heard the thrum of tires against pavement. He wasn’t dead after all, just waking up after an involuntary snooze: how long had he been out? He wasn’t in a coffin but in the trunk of a moving car—Artie’s or someone else’s? Taking him where?

As they drove and Toby regained his senses, he used elbows, knees and feet to explore the trunk’s interior. A spare tire rested in a shallow well at his head. Coarse carpeting flowed under his body. Something clanked at his toes.

The car slowed, idled for a moment, then turned left. Thirty seconds later it drew to a halt and the engine was shut down. A car door slammed. Toby heard footsteps receding. As soon as the sounds faded, Toby attempted to use his feet to extract a jack nestled in a recessed compartment at his feet. Maybe he could use it or the tire iron beside it to free his wrists, pry his way out of the trunk and escape.

It took supreme effort, working in the dark by the clumsy touch of his booted feet, to free the steel bar from its prongs. Now the angled iron was pinched awkwardly between his ankles. If he could just worm forward, bend his legs and bring his feet up close to his butt, he might be able to grab the iron. He almost had it. Cold metal brushed tantalizingly against his fingertips as he contorted his lanky body within the cramped confines of the trunk.

Outside, a door slammed. Footsteps sounded again, coming closer. There was a click and the trunk lid popped open. A little interior bulb, like a refrigerator’s, lit up, making Toby squint.

A large, wide man wordlessly reached in to drag him out.

Night had come, but light fell from a huge stone house twenty feet away. Toby, blinking in subdued illumination that seemed awfully bright after the absolute darkness of the car trunk, recognized the place: Giambi’s residence in Cazenovia. Its long driveway descended gently towards the darker bulk of the high wall fencing in the property.

The large, silent man clamped a big hand on Toby’s left arm and propelled him towards a side door. Inside, Toby got a good look at the man with the vise-like grip. His close-cropped head, the size and shape of a bowling ball, seemed to sit directly on the massive shoulders of a barrel-like body. A single bushy eyebrow sheltered a pair of dark, piggish eyes above a lump of nose and fleshy lips. The man was 6′5″ and 350 pounds if he was an ounce. Toby felt small beside him.

They passed an opening of a huge, tile-floored kitchen. Dezi, in tan slacks and white blouse, sat hunched at a breakfast bar, talking with a chunky, pleasant-faced, gray-haired woman wearing a flowered dress. Her mother? Preoccupied with their hushed conversation, the two women did not notice Toby and his escort glide by.

The large man shouldered Toby through a couple turns. They marched along a wood-paneled hallway hung with matted watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings framed in brushed chrome. After thirty feet, the hallway opened into a vaulted-ceiling area with clusters of furniture spaced here and there. One whole wall was a fieldstone fireplace, the opening high enough for Toby’s guard to walk into without ducking his head. Two walls held arrangements of oil paintings: abstracts over here, flanking floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a couple nudes across the room. The fourth wall, facing the lake, was all glass.

Artie, now dressed in a dark suit, and another man stood there, staring out at the night and conversing in low voices. A third man, small, and old, was just hanging up a phone beside a doorway in one wall. They all turned as Toby was steered to the middle of the room. The hulk backed off a few yards while Artie and the others drifted over.

The man on the phone was a small, dapper fellow with a bulbous nose, protruding, pouched eyes, a face full of wrinkles and saggy jowls like a bloodhound. A liver spot showed at the edge of sparse, steel gray hair. Toby had seen him in Dezi’s wedding photos.

The other stranger could model as a movie vampire. An inch or two shorter than Toby, he looked taller, thanks to a blade-thin nose on a narrow, long-jawed face, topped by a piled-high, swept-back haircut that emphasized a deep widow’s peak. The man’s slender neck and long, tapering fingers accentuated his slim figure.

The three men formed a loose semicircle around Toby. The thin man studied Toby like a shark deciding where to bite. His black eyes were fathomless. “Artie says you’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you.” The dry, unemotional tone confirmed he was the man whom Toby had overheard talking to the Puterbaughs: Leo.

“I could say the same,” Toby nodded at the old man, “about Mr. Giambi.”

Leo’s bony fingers whipped out and cracked across Toby’s mouth. “Did anybody ask you to speak?”

Giambi raised a hand. Leo moved back. The old man shuffled forward, squinting at Toby. “Do I know you?” His wheeze sounded as bad as Randy Rew’s at the end.

Toby felt blood trickle from a cut lip and licked it. “We’ve never been introduced.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I’ve heard it around.”

“Why do you want to cause trouble for an old man like me?” Giambi came within a few feet to peer up into Toby’s face. Close-up, he smelled like a pile of dead leaves despite subtle cologne. Nice suit, though. Toby felt underdressed in coveralls.

“I’m not trying to cause trouble for anybody, especially you, Mr. Giambi. Things just happened. Like the murder I witnessed at the Puterbaughs.”

The old man shot Artie a poisoned glance and the hit man cringed. “That was unfortunate. Unnecessary.”

“Should have kept your beak out of our business,” Leo said. “But you had to call the cops.”

“If I hadn’t gone to them, they’d have come to me.”

“They wouldn’t have known about it at all without you telling them.” Leo crossed his arms. “The problem would have been taken care of clean as a whistle otherwise.”

“Bull!” Toby said. Leo glared, ready to lash out again, but a glance at Giambi stayed his hand. “The cover-up was as clumsy as the murder. Couldn’t you find a better place to park a body than my truck?”

“Your truck?” Giambi rounded on Leo. “Is this true, Tombs? You involved an outsider in our business?”

Leo shrugged. “The boys I sent to handle the cleanup didn’t follow orders. They ad-libbed. I have to work with idiots.”

“So do I, it seems,” Giambi muttered.

“Do you blame me for getting pissed about being saddled with a dead man?” Toby said to the old man.

“No. I completely understand the concept of revenge.”

Giambi’s eyes darted to the slab of beef hovering in the background. “Give me your knife.” The hulk instantly handed over a lock-back with a four-inch blade snapped open. Toby tensed as the old man slipped behind him, then relaxed when he realized Giambi was only cutting the ropes binding his unfeeling wrists. Giambi handed the knife back to its owner, who folded the blade and dropped the weapon into a pocket. “Gino, bring a wet cloth so Mr. Rew can clean himself.”

Gino trotted away and hurried back, handing Toby a warm, soaking washcloth. He swabbed his face, gingerly washing a cut over his ear. The cloth came away streaked with blood and he gave it to Gino, who ran away to dispose of it.

“Then it turns out the dead man is a Mexican government bigwig,” Toby said.

“Yes,” Leo said, “a man named Revuelto.”

How did he know? Toby wondered. “Then,” he said to Giambi, “your daughter’s brought into the picture.”

“You know my daughter? From what Artie tells me, Desdemona knows lots of men, the slut!”

Giambi reached into a suit pocket and flung a handful of postcard-sized color photos to the floor. This one showed Dezi and Mark grappling naked in the tub. In that one they’d been discovered. Mark’s face was blank, while Dezi’s was contorted, mouth open in the beginning of a scream or curse.