The Consummata (15 page)

“Hello, Gaita,” I said.

She took in a soft gasp, laid the scissors slowly down, and allowed a tremor of relief to take her body.

“Morgan,” she said, “you bastard. Don’t do that again—not
ever
! People, they can get killed that way.”

“People can get killed a lot of ways.”

That melted her glare, which became a self-conscious smile as she realized the negligee had partially opened, and the suddenly shy little courtesan, with a deft motion of her fingers, folded the lapels one under the other, covering the fullness of her dark-tipped breasts.

“You look like you’re dressed for a client,” I said.

Her eyebrows rose indignantly and her nostrils flared with pride. “
Señor
Morgan—do not mistake me for the others who work here. Gaita chooses her own company—I am the only one at the Mandor Club with this privilege.”

“Any guy you choose would be a lucky devil.”

She shook her head and dark curls bounced off her shoulders. “These days I choose to be alone.”

“Expensive choice in your trade.”

She ignored that, cocked her head and peered at me. “You surprise me, Morgan.”

I sat on the edge of a bed. Soft, springy, with a tropical floral spread.

“There aren’t many places left for me to go in this town,” I said. “The hotels aren’t safe. They either have a photo of me, or my room blows up before I get there.”

Gaita let seconds drag past before she replied, never taking her eyes from my face. “That’s why I have been waiting, Morgan. I knew you would come back.”

“I thought you said I surprised you.”

“I didn’t hear you enter. But I knew you would come. You have questions?”

I glanced at the door, then back to her.

“It is locked,” she said. “Even Bunny does not have a key. We have privacy.”

That meant a guy could slap her around till she talked, or toss her lovely behind on the lush carpet and ravish her, and with a hand over her mouth, who would know?

Instead I just there sat on the edge of the bed, realizing for the first time how damn tired I was. Somehow a few days had slipped by and there had just been odd fragments of sleep grabbed in even odder places.

With no menace at all, I asked, “Why’d you pick the Amherst, Gaita?”

“Because it was a hotel I could afford. It was not a special place, only out of the way, where I thought you would be safe.”

“Nobody suggested it to you?”

“No,
Señor
Morgan. It was my idea only.”

“Your friend Tami—you trust her?”

“Completely.”

I slipped out of my sport jacket and tossed it on a chair. The .45 in the shoulder sling was showing now. “How’d you make the arrangements?”

“By phone from here.”

“I don’t see a phone in this room.”

“I used Miss Bunny’s private line.”

And Bunny had assured me her phone wasn’t tapped.

“Could anyone have overheard you?”

“I do not think so. The door, it was closed. I spoke softly. With my hand cupped, like this? No, I’m sure there was no one listening.”

“Could Tami have passed the information on?”

Gaita gave a slow negative shake of her head, her hair swirling softly about her neck. “Already, I have asked her.
Nada
did she remember mentioning to anyone, not even accidentally. And she knew of the importance of your escape, if not the reasons.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her chin raised. There was no fear in her voice but I could make out a slight movement in her dark eyes. “Morgan, do you suspect
me
? Do you think that
I
....”

“No,” I said.

“You trust me? You believe me?”

“As far as it goes. I just don’t think it would’ve gone down that way.”

“What way,
señor
?”

“That simple. If I escaped from the trap at the Amherst—and that’s what I’m known for, doll, escaping—they’d know you’d be the first person I asked. They’d probably expect me to torture the truth out of you.”

“Then they have not paid attention to the legend.”

“What legend?”

“Your legend, Morgan. The legend of the Raider—a man of light who lives in the darkness.”

I gave that the snort it deserved. “Maybe Disney will make a TV show out of it.”

She smiled then, a lovely, full-lipped smile that was less in response to my little gag than to my belief in her honesty. It was a lovely thank you in an elegant manner, and the tension went out of her like the receding of a wave.

Yet her eyes still held that intense look, probing for
answers. “I did not expect it would be like this, Morgan.”

“Like how?”

“Filled with such complication. At first, the mission was only for you to find for us Jaimie Halaquez, and recover our missing funds. Now Bunny has told me of what else has happened— the dead assassin at her apartment building. Even now, she waits for you to call her, sitting there in the office, drinking champagne.”

“What’s she celebrating?”

“Nothing,
señor
. Quite the reverse. She only does this when she is very much upset.”

“Get her up here.”

“At once.” She stood up, pulled the belt of the negligee tight and went to the door. “Keep it locked behind me, Morgan. I have the key. I’ll let myself back in.”

“Don’t worry about me, kid.”

“
Con su permiso
, I will worry about us all.”

Then she was gone like a lovely wraith and I lay back on the oversize bed, and folded my hands behind my head, staring at myself in the mirror on the ceiling. If that thing had been a television screen, it would have some wild reruns to play.

Right now I looked like a rerun of myself—on a distant channel that was coming in fuzzy as hell. I looked like ten miles of bad road.

Twenty.

My sport coat and sport shirt and slacks were of high quality, but I’d been in them so long, they were a wrinkled mess and needed a wash. Me, too. Plus a shave.

I closed my eyes for just a moment, and never even heard
them come back. When Bunny shook me, I woke up swearing at myself, because nodding off like that could get me killed.

“Morgan,” Bunny said, almost a snarl, “will you please be quiet!”

“Sorry, baby.” I didn’t realize the .45 was in my hand until I saw them both gaping at it, then I stuck it back in its berth under my left arm.

Bunny shoved me back onto the bed. “Take it easy, cowboy.” She gave me an appraising look and let out a disgusted sigh. “You look like hell.”

“I feel like hell.” I wiped my hand across my face and the bristles damn near hurt my tender little palm. I looked at the hostess of the Mandor Club. “You don’t exactly look
your
best either, kiddo.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she said. “Like they say, with friends like you who needs enemies.”

This little adventure was taking its toll on her. Worry lines creased her face, showing through the makeup, and her hair was straggling loose from its formerly artful styling. With those purple streaks, she had a Bride of Frankenstein look as she clutched a handful of note papers, fidgeting with the clips that bound them.

I sat up with a couple of plump pillows propped behind me. “What have you got there, Bunny?”

“First things first.” She sat on the edge of the bed. Lithe legs crossed, Gaita was seated at the makeup mirror, but had her back to it, facing us.

“I did what you told me, Morg,” Bunny said. “I made inquiries about that murdered client of mine, Dick Best. There was no next of kin and nobody to claim the body. The
cops thought it was goddamn big-hearted of me to contribute toward a decent burial, and it didn’t seem funny to them at all, when I asked how he was killed.”

“How
was
he killed?”

“The usual unidentified blunt instrument that broke his neck. Or it could have a blow from a hand, if the killer was skilled enough.”

“A karate chop, you mean?”

She nodded. “They said it was a common mugging technique.”

I smirked in disgust. “It really isn’t. But that helps the Miami fuzz close the file and not have to look into the matter.”

She was nodding again. “Which they didn’t, and aren’t. They wrote it off as homicide during a burglary gone wrong. They figured Best surprised the robber and got himself killed in the struggle.”

“How did the thief get in and out?”

Bunny shrugged. “Either picked the lock or had a skeleton key. There was a fire escape in the hall. Morg, it really is pretty standard stuff.”

“Is it? I’d say we’re seeing a pattern.”

“How so?” Her forehead knitted.

“Somebody likes those single-handed blows. That’s how the old porter got it at the Amherst hotel, after he screwed up a certain simple assignment an old
amigo
of yours hired him to do.”

Gaita whispered, “Jaimie Halaquez....”

“At least he’s consistent,” I said. “Give him that much.”

Bunny, still on the edge of the bed near me, said, “But the
Cuban boys that were tracking him—in Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi...
they
didn’t die that way.”

Gaita said, “Halaquez used a blade. They die slow and painful, those boys, with their insides in their hands.”

“Two different kinds of kills,” I said, clinically. “Those brave kids were made to suffer—to make them examples, and to send a message back to Little Havana. And they may not have been killed by Halaquez at all.”

“What?” Gaita snapped.

It was Gaita’s question, but I aimed the answer at Bunny. “They may have been killed
for
him by the Cuban assassin who died in your apartment house lobby. Fitting, he died by the blade.”

“You’re a cold-blooded bastard,” Bunny said with a shiver.

“A breathing one,” I said, then went on: “The old man and this Richard Best required efficient kills, not so messy, not so noisy.”

The Mandor’s madam had a glazed, dazed expression. “So he’s still around, our Jaimie....”

“Well,” I said, “more like he’s back. Bunny, you said first things first. First, was finding out from the cops how Dick Best bought it. What’s second?”

Now she smiled; now her eyes took on a twinkle. “Finding out who Dick Best
really
was.”

I leaned forward. “
Who
, Bunny?”

“A businessman I was introduced to years ago...but
not
as Richard Best—different last name...Parvain.”

Meant nothing to me.

She continued: “Now this goes back a good twenty years,
Morg. I
though
t Dick Best looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him—and he looked
more
than twenty years older. Anyway, after seeing the poor S.O.B. stretched out on the morgue tray, well, I came back here and sat down for a good think. Best and I had talked lots of times, in the last year or so—had anything of it meant anything, I wondered?”

“Had it?”

“Maybe. It came back to me that one day, a couple years ago—Best and I were sitting in the bar downstairs, and he gets to telling me about a business of his called Possibilities, Inc. And how it was too bad my husband wasn’t around to get in on the ground floor with him again.”

“
Again?
”

“Yes,
again
, he said. Morg, at the time, I wondered what he meant by that. But I didn’t ask, because you don’t pry with clients, or maybe I just got distracted...but at any rate...I never asked him about it.”

“Understandable,” I granted.

“Then seeing him
dead
like that, suddenly something jarred loose. I
remembered
something. I remembered that when my husband kicked off, I went through some papers he left, and there was a notation about this Possibilities, Inc.”

She gestured with the yellowed packet that she had been holding onto like the railing at a sharp drop-off.

“So I dug them up again,” she said, “from my old box of souvenirs from back when we were rich and infamous.”

Bunny tossed the moldy sheaf my way, and I picked it up, wondering what answers it might hold.

“They may not make much sense to you,” Bunny said.
“That old fox I was married to wasn’t much for making notes that the income tax people might follow. But you’ll see that he invested ten thousand in a gimmick Parvain invented that was supposed to detect uranium ore from an airplane, instead of working at ground level.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, back in those days of all the big strikes in Canada. Up north, everybody and his brother was inventing these gizmos that claimed to sniff out the stuff.”

“What are we talking about here,” I asked, “glorified Geiger counters?”

She nodded and tendrils blonde and purple bounced. “Exactly right—least as far as I understand it. Nothing ever came of Parvain’s deal, or I would have heard about it. My dear departed reprobate husband liked to brag about his scores, but if something didn’t pan out, it became a dead issue.”

I leafed through the pages, which dated to the mid-1950s, and found the phrase “Possibilities, Inc.” twice, among a couple of rows of abstract figuring, and a half-paragraph in an almost illegible scrawl. A heavy check mark went through the whole page, like a memorandum to forget it. “Bunny, you said Best mentioned that it was too bad your husband wasn’t in with him
again
. Maybe those Possibilities panned out after all.”

She shrugged grandly. “If they did, why didn’t Best have a pot to piss in? Unless him living like an old fart on a fixed income was just a front.”

“Maybe he was hanging around your club because he
eventually planned to hit you up for a touch—to refinance a business your husband had been part of.”

Bunny shook her head thoughtfully. “No, the conversation in question goes back a good couple of years, and Best never mentioned the subject again.”

Something wasn’t adding up.

I asked, “Where the hell did Best get the kind of money it takes to hang out at the Mandor Club? And how did a nebbish like that even gain entry?”

That stopped her. “Be damned if I know. Somebody on our approved list must have brought him in as an invited guest.”

“Is that something you can track?”

“Probably not. Why?”

“Because he was murdered. And anything to do with nuclear physics can be important enough to get somebody killed. It’s the only damn lead we have.”