Tango Key (26 page)

She stared at him.

"You don't believe it, do you," he said.

But she did believe it, and she said as much.

"And just for the record, her flirtation with pain is something that must've developed with Cooper, because there was nothing like that when I knew her. Or if there was, she never let on."

"You think she killed Cooper? Based on what you know about her?"

"When we were talking to Prentiss, I honestly felt that she and Alan might've been in on this together. Then I thought about it today, and now. . ." He shook his head. "No. She's weird, she has some strange ideas, and she's not the most honest person I've ever met. But she's no killer."

B
y 10:58 they were seated at the bar of the Flamingo Hotel, waiting for Plano. At 11:20 the band had returned from their break and Plano still hadn't shown. Finally, shortly after 11:30, Kincaid suggested she call his room. She used one of the in-house phones in the lobby and on the tenth ring hung up and rode the elevator to the second floor. His room was at the end of the hall. She raised her hand to knock on the door and realized it wasn't shut. Frowning, she nudged it open with her foot. It creaked.

"Juan?" she called softly.

Nothing.

The nightstand lamp was on, the spread on the bed was pulled back, the sheets were rumpled, a shirt was draped over the back of a chair. The bathroom was empty, but smelled faintly of after-shave. His suitcase was on the floor, clothes spilling out of it. His briefcase was open on the desk, and she moved toward it. "Juan?"

She rifled through the briefcase, found nothing, moved on to his suitcase. The phone rang a dozen times, its peal startling her, then fell silent.

His suitcase now: Aline crouched in front of it. Her fingers picked through the clothes, the pockets. Her heart started its soft-shoe shuffle across the inside of her chest, and her senses tightened into a kind of hyper-alert.
Shame, shame
, nagged a little voice inside her.
No search warrant. That's twice in one night. Don't push your luck
. She heard a cough in the hall that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Another cough. Coming this way. Adrenaline poured into her blood. She shot to her feet. She would tell Plano she'd found the door open and had stepped in, looking for him. She would say . . . she would . . .

She looked about frantically for a place to hide. The closet was the first place most people went, and she hadn't hidden in a bathroom since Janet Leigh was stabbed in Psycho. She dived under the bed.

This was going to be tough to explain.

Bad enough if he found her, but suppose he went to bed? She would have to wait until he was asleep before she dared slide out, and even then, he might be a light sleeper. He might be the sort of man who, if he saw a dark figure moving around his room, would shoot first and ask questions later.

All right. She had one choice. She would blow her little facade as the American from Panama, tell him who she was and that if he didn't give her some answers quick, he'd be on the next plane back to Bogota. But just as she started to slide out from under the bed she smelled perfume. A thick, cloying scent. Unless Plano was into women's perfume, it sure as hell wasn't him out there.

Between the edge of the bedspread and the floor was a crack wide enough for her to see a pair of sandals and toenails painted the color of raspberries. The feet moved to the left of the bed and Aline's eyes followed. Now she saw hands pulling clothes from Plano's suitcase. Now the feet moved toward the closet, then back to the bed, then the bathroom, then finally toward the door again.

Aline waited.

Seconds ticked by.

A minute.

When she heard the elevator doors sliding closed in the hall, she slid out from under the bed and hobbled as fast as she could on her sprained ankle toward the hall.
I'll beat her to the lobby by taking the stairs.
She slammed her hand against the horizontal bar that crossed the door to the stairs and plunged into the dark in the stairwell. Why was the light out? What was that smell? Why was her chest burning?

Aline clutched at the railing, holding on to it as she made her way down. Just as she reached the landing between the first and second floors, her foot struck something. She stumbled. Her arms shot out to break her fall. She slammed into the wall in front of her, went down, arms pinwheeling. She struck whatever it was that had tripped her, and gasped.

A body, Jesus, there's a body on the landing.

She scrambled up, her hand sliding through something warm and wet.
Blood. Oh God, a lot of blood. And those other smells. . .
Feces, urine, the inexorable stench of death. Sweet Christ, the light, where was the light switch, there had to be a switch somewhere. She patted the wall frantically, making her way down the stairs to the first floor, but there wasn't any switch. She stumbled to the door, burst through it, and light from the lobby poured into the stairwell. She drank it in, pulled the light into herself, a scream stuck at the tip of her tongue. Then she saw the blood on her hands and the blood smeared from the wall at the foot of the stairs up to the landing. There. Plano. She saw him now.

The Colombian was sprawled on his back, a steak knife protruding from his chest.

A
line sat across a square wooden table from Alan Cooper. His hands were folded tightly in front of him, the tiny hills of his knuckles whiter than dough. His shirt was wrinkled. He was neither handsome nor dapper at the moment; he looked scared shitless.

"Okay, Mr. Cooper," said Gene Frederick, who'd been pacing behind Cooper's chair. "Let's go over this very slowly. Around seven-thirty this evening, you were seen in the bar, having an argument with Juan Plano. Now Plano is dead. Mighty coincidental. What were you arguing about?"

"Over who was going to pay the tab. Look, I already told you where I was."

"And now you're gonna tell us again, pal. And then you're going to answer a few other questions. So let's go over it once more. What were you and Plano arguing about?"

Silence.

"Where were you tonight between ten and when the Colombian's body was found?"

"I was meeting with Carlos Ortiz, my father's attorney, until ten-thirty. He can verify that."

"He already has," Aline replied. "He said you left his house at ten-twenty. So where were you from ten-twenty until eleven-fifty, when I found Mr. Plano's body?"

"Driving."

"Driving where?" Frederick asked.

Cooper ran his hands over his face and rubbed the back of his neck. "Am I under arrest?"

"Arrest?" Frederick shook his head. "No one said anything about an arrest, Mr. Cooper. We just want some answers, that's all. So for the moment, let's forget about this little drive you took. Let's talk about your relationship with Juan Plano."

Cooper rubbed his eyes, sat back, and lit a cigarette. Something—anger, perhaps, Aline thought—seemed to hiss out of him, and it made his shoulders stoop, his chest heave, the lids of his eyes drop lower. He was going to spill his guts, all right, but she had a feeling it wasn't going to be about how he killed the Colombian. She didn't think he'd done it. But Cavello's alibi had checked out and so had Waite's, and, hey, that was it for suspects, except for Eve, who Dobbs had gone to pick up.

"Not too long after my father and I patched up our differences, early April, I think it was, I went on one of the digs with him. To the Lost City. We flew into Barranquilla and Juan picked us up at the airport and drove us to Santa Marta. The next day, we took a helicopter to Juan's camp, which is about a thousand feet below the Lost City."

"What sort of camp?" Aline was thinking of the entry in Waite's appointment book.

"Plano was chief archaeologist on the project. This camp was where he and his men lived. Huts, hammocks, nothing fancy, believe me. That's when I first heard about this gold frog."

"From Plano?" Frederick asked.

Cooper nodded. Plano and his men, he explained, had discovered several ancient graves which the
huaqueros
—treasure hunters—had missed. They were filled with gold figures and ornaments. "And since Juan was the head honcho, he had access to the sites, and he was removing artifacts from them and selling them to people like my father."

"And paying off a customs official named Sanchez to smuggle them into the States?" Aline asked.

Cooper looked at her sharply. "If you know that, then maybe you oughta be telling this story."

"I only know part of the story, Mr. Cooper. What I'm really curious about is why you didn't tell me all this the day we talked."

"Because I knew how it would sound. Because I was hoping the pieces would start coming together. I was waiting for Eve to make a move. She killed him, you know. She killed my dad."

"Right now," said Frederick, "we aren't talking about your father. You were telling us about the gold frog."

Cooper blew smoke into the air above his head, and the currents from the vents caught it, curled it, dissipated it. "For a long time, people in archaeology circles have felt that the frog, if it existed, was probably buried in one of the graves in the Lost City. But Juan believed it had been buried in one of the caves the Taironas used for the training of their sorcerers. Their
mamas
." Those male children chosen as initiates lived for nine years in caves learning the art of sorcery, he said. They weren't allowed contact with females. They weren't permitted to see the sun. As a kind of compensation, Plano reasoned, they were permitted daily contact with the most revered of deities—the gold frog icon.

"Anyway, on that trip in early April, Juan announced that he'd found the frog. We trekked two days into the mountains to where he'd hidden it. And it was everything he'd said it would be. He was getting ready to 'court' bids from various buyers on the frog, but wanted to give my father the chance to set the floor price. So he did. Seven million—which was probably three times more than any of Juan's other prospects could afford. In early May, Juan made a trip up here, my father paid him half the money, and the other half was supposed to be made on delivery."

"Uh, Mr. Cooper," Aline interrupted. "Your father placed a seven-million-dollar bid on an artifact that might've been a fake?"

Unease seemed to seep through the pores of his skin and leak across his face. "My father knew enough about archaeology to be able to assess whether the frog was a fake. But he, uh, also enlisted Ed Waite's expertise."

"So Mr. Waite was there?" Frederick asked.

Cooper nodded.

"And what about Ted Cavello?"

"What was Waite supposed to get for doing this?" Aline prodded.

Cooper ran a hand over his face. "He got paid a consulting fee. A substantial fee. Eighty grand. My father didn't like him much as a person, but he respected Ed's expertise. Respected it enough so that when Dad died, the artifact was supposed to go to the museum. But that's changed now." He looked from Aline to Frederick. "I guess you already know about the changes in the will."

Frederick nodded. "How was the money to be paid?"

"The first half went to Juan in early May. Like I said, he flew up here to get it. I don't know what he did with it, how he got it out of the country, nothing. I just know that Dad paid him, because I was there. Then in late May we flew to Colombia to pick up the frog."

"And Waite went with you," Aline said.

"Yes."

"And your father paid Plano the rest of the money then?"

"It was wired to an account in the Caicos."

"Then where the hell is the frog?" Frederick barked.

"I don't know. I thought it was going into the safe-deposit box. That's the God's honest truth. I went back to Marathon the following day, and two days later my old man was dead."

Frederick was pacing again, puffing on a cigar. "So why was Plano up here?"

"More artifacts for sale." Cooper's smile was small, sad. "I told him I wasn't in the market and that if he was smart, he'd get outa the market and go retire on his seven mil. He said he didn't have seven million, that my father had never paid him the rest of the money. That's what we were arguing about."

Aline said, "So how does Ted Cavello fit in?"

"I'm not sure. I do know he met Plano through my dad, and that maybe Cavello is buying artifacts, too. But that's just a guess."

She thought of the photograph of the gold frog in the file they'd lifted from Cavello's office. "Is it possible that Cavello also placed a bid on the frog, Mr. Cooper?"

"Could be. But financially, he's way out of the league."

"You know a woman named Lilly?"

Cooper shook his head. "No. Who is she?"

"I was hoping you could tell me," Aline replied.

"How'd Plano find the frog, do you know?" Frederick asked.

"No. I don't know how he found any of the stuff. I mean, there've been teams of archaeologists and engineers and scientists up there ever since the place opened, and
they
didn't find as much in twelve years as Plano found in three."