The Spanish Connection (15 page)

"You don't really look Italian," said Kelly with that wide, disarming grin of his.

Parson's face stiffened. "Well, neither do you."

"I don't
profess
to be," Kelly rejoined.

Parsons eyes narrowed. He glanced at me and then, seeing no expression on my face, turned back to Kelly. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"It is supposed to mean: How can you prove you're the man you claim you are?"

Parson relaxed. "Well, now. I think I've proved it to your colleague. Isn't that enough?"

"I'm the man who has to arrange your transportation to the States." Kelly's face tightened. "I don't fancy trying to smuggle in the wrong man!"

"I'm the
right
man," Parson said, his accent noticeably diminishing. He began to sound more like the «Corelli» role he had played with me at the Veleta. I sat back enjoying the give-and-take.

"I feel we are talking about two different things, Mr. Parson," Kelly said politely. "I have authorization to arrange transportation to the United States for the man who is the key figure in the Mediterranean drug chain."

"I am the man," snapped Parson.

"The man's name is Rico Corelli. Are you Rico Corelli?" Kelly wore a vague smile that did not touch his eyes.

"Yes. I am Rico Corelli." Parson's lips were white and he had them pressed together very tightly. Tension, tension.

"I am afraid you will have to prove that to my satisfaction, Signor Corelli."

Parson put his hand to his mouth. "Not so loud! That name is known everywhere!"

"No one can hear with all this noise," smiled Kelly. "I repeat, you will have to prove your identity to me."

"But I have already given the material that can prove it to George Peabody."

I shrugged.

Kelly reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an envelope. It was letter-size. He opened it and drew out a tiny roll of film. He placed the roll in the middle of the table.

The waiter brought Kelly's drink.

Parson stared at the roll.

"My microfilm?" he asked in a hushed voice.

"No.
Rico Corelli's,"
said Kelly.

"But I gave the film to Mr. Peabody! The
real
Rico Corelli film!"

"Negative, Parson. That is impossible."

"How, impossible?" Parson was running a good bluff, but I could see the tension around his eyes — tiny crow's feet of nerves fanning out into his flesh.

"I am Rico Corelli, Parson. And I dare you to dispute that fact."

Parson's face was like granite. I was reminded of the schist along the ski run. He stared at the roll of microfilm. He picked it up to look at it some more, even went to the trouble of unrolling it.

"No need to try to read it," Kelly said. "It's too small to see. And, anyway, it's a duplicate."

There was a thin bead of perspiration on Parson's forehead. "A duplicate?"

"Oh, yes, indeed," Kelly said with a smile a cobra would have envied.

"And the original?"

"Mr. Peabody has sent it along to Washington for verification with the Narcotics Bureau of his great country"

Parson stared at Kelly for a long moment. Finally he let his breath out in a long sigh.

"Well," he said. "Well, well, well."

"Indeed yes, Barry," I said with a smile. "Well?"

He turned to me, his lips twisted. "What made you set up this kind of charade? I don't understand you."

He was going on the defensive. Mitch Kelly and I had succeeded in our primary intent. We had determined that Parson was not Corelli. If he had been Corelli, he would have scoffed and laughed, and congratulated me on my little game. But he would not have knuckled under. The problem from Parson's viewpoint was that he did not know who Corelli was at all; he suspected Mitch Kelly might indeed be he. And the microfilm unnerved him. His had been fake. This could be genuine. He simply did not know how to proceed.

"Actually," I said with a smile, "this meeting was set up at the instigation of Mr. Corelli." I nodded toward Kelly.

Kelly smiled. "Yes. I wanted to see what the man who had been hired to kill me looked like."

Parson's face was a mask of old leather goods.

"You're being very humorous, Mr. Kelly."

"You can call me Corelli. You hear the similarity, Mr. Parson?"

What a damned coincidence! I thought. There was not an ounce of truth in what Kelly implied — that he had taken on the name Kelly to sound like Corelli. But it played beautifully.

"All right. Corelli. It's a cat-and-mouse game." Parson's forehead was gleaming with perspiration now. "I don't like cat-and-mouse games."

"Nobody does," said Kelly. "Especially the mouse. A minute ago you were the cat. Now you ve got red eyes."

Parson sighed. "Go ahead. What is it you want?"

"I want to know why you tried to play me for a sucker!" I snapped.

Parson smiled thinly. "I've been playing you for a sucker from the first minute I met you, George — whatever your name is, Mr. Secret Agent from America — and I do not distinguish which particular moment you refer to."

"That was unkind," I said softly. "Most unkind of you, Barry-baby." I leaned toward him. "I mean when you took on the role of Corelli at Veleta."

He shrugged, his face fixed in a frozen smile. "Very simple. I'd bugged your car. And I was there when Arturo was killed. I went to Veleta to find Corelli and kill him."

I glanced at Mitch Kelly, and he ducked his head down and drank his liquor.

"Then you were at the cable car engine room the first night?"

"Of course. I followed you to Sol y Nieve to find Corelli. It was simply a matter of being sure I met everyone you did."

"So you knew I was meeting Corelli…" I turned to look at Mitch Kelly"…midnight at the Veleta."

"Right."

"And you were waiting for me when I got there?"

"Exactly." Parson smiled faintly. "I could hardly explain away the coincidence, could I? I had to say I was Corelli when you found me. And, besides, I knew I would eventually find Rico Corelli through you." He turned to Kelly. "As I have."

"It was a kind of sudden inspiration, wasn't it?" I suggested.

"That's right." Parson was gaining confidence.

"And you figured Corelli would surface to find out why you were impersonating him?"

"Something like that"

"And you hoped the fake microfilm wouldn't have been checked by that time?"

"I had to take
some
chances."

I leaned back, watching him. "Not quite, Barry. Nice try. But not quite good enough."

Parson frowned. "I don't understand."

"The fact is, you cut that brake line in the Renault before I left for Veleta. You wanted me completely out of the picture. You wanted to have Corelli all to yourself at the monument so you could kill him and go off scot free. Right?"

Parson took a deep breath. "I deny it. Why would I go to all that trouble to save you afterward, when your car went out of control?"

Kelly looked at me. It was a telling argument.

But I knew the answer to that "You
needed
me after Corelli did not show up at the meeting. I was the only one left who could lead you to him. Aside from Juana. But Juana was not authorized to meet with Corelli until I had set it up. You had to have me, Barry. Alive. Why not pretend you were Corelli, until Corelli finally did make himself known to me. Right?"

He sat there stonily.

The lights suddenly went out in the discothèque, and then flared up again. The stereo had been turned off and the dancers had left the postage-stamp floor. Professional Spanish dancers were assembling on the small stage dressed in flamenco costumes. Six guitar players were seated in chairs at the rear of the stage.

In the ensuing moments, the singer — a male — came forward, strumming his guitar, and started to narrate the story of the dance.

"What do you want with me?" Parson asked now, looking across at Kelly.

"Somebody hired you to kill me," said Kelly, flat-lipped.

"I deny that," said Parson.

"Don't give me that kind of crap," said Kelly in a low threatening voice. "Somebody hired you. You're a professional killer. Barry Parson is a cover name. You've been on the payrolls of a dozen countries since World War Two. Come on. Interpol knows all about you."

This was one we had pulled out of the hat.

Parson's face turned to ice. "I work for hire, that's true. I work for anyone who pays me."

I glanced at Kelly. He kept on the pressure. Parson had cracked. He had admitted it. He was up for ire. He would work for Kelly now if Kelly put the ice high enough.

But we did not want that at all.

"Who hired you to kill me?" Kelly asked again.

"If I tell you, I'll be target for tonight," said Parson with a hollow laugh.

"If you don't, you're target right now sitting in this discothèque," said Kelly, putting plenty of force behind the words.

"I'm dead either way," Parson reasoned.

"We'll get you out of here. Tell me who hired you and we'll start for the door right away. We'll get you away from the resort. I have assistants."

Kelly turned and glanced at the bar. One of the waiters standing there looked at Kelly and nodded. Then Kelly glanced at a table in the far corner of the room. A man in black was seated there. He tipped his beret with his finger when Kelly looked at him.

A little window-dressing to make it look right.

Parson was pale now.

The flamenco music started, and a soloist came out to dance. He was fast and sure-footed. His heels went like machine-gun fire. The dance increased in tempo and volume.

"Tell me who hired you!" Kelly rasped.

"Not that," Parson snapped. "Anything else, but not that."

"The Mafiosi?" I asked.

He looked at me scornfully. "That was Moscato's bosses! Not me." His eyes widened. He realized he had practically told me who had hired him.

There was only one person left!

"It was her!" I whispered, leaning close to Parson. "Tina!"

He seemed frozen in time and space.

He opened his mouth and closed it again. His head gave a slight nod. That was all.

Then he moved.

He moved with lightning speed. I saw his hand on his lap dart for the belt where he had his big Webley hidden. I had seen the lump it made in his shirt front. He was hoping to get Kelly with the first shot, but I chopped out at his gun hand the instant he drew. That was the reason I had placed him to my left — so I could control his gun hand. The shot blasted loud and clear, but luckily went wild into the floor.

Instantly there was a second shot.

Parson tensed against the rear of the seat, then slumped in the way a puppet droops when its strings are dropped, and let his head pitch forward onto the table top.

I put my foot on the Webley revolver and Kelly rose quickly to move beside Parson s body. There was so much noise from the music, dancing, and
olaying,
that to our astonishment no one had really noticed the byplay in the darkness of the discothèque.

Kelly grabbed Parson by the shoulder and straightened him in the seat. I reached down and picked up the Webley, stashing it in between my belt and stomach. Then I turned and grasped Parson's right shoulder and helped Kelly lift him to his feet. Supporting him between us, we wove our way through the packed tables toward the doorway of the discothèque.

"
Muy borracho."
Kelly nodded to one of the waiters.

The waiter smiled sympathetically.

The second flamenco dance was continuing, with the machine-gun shots of the dancers' heels making it impossible to differentiate between the sounds of a real machine pistol and the dancing heels of the local Jose Greco.

"Sometimes I get to hate this job," Kelly told me as we emerged into the lobby from the stairs.

We pulled the lifeless body of Barry Parson across the lobby — luckily deserted at the moment — to the stairway and then started the slow climb up.

He was very dead when we finally laid him out on his own bed in his own room.

Mitch Kelly had been a detective on the San Francisco police force for several years before he resigned to join AXE's stable. I had barely closed the door to Barry Parson's room before he was going quickly through the pockets of Parsons clothes.

He laid the contents out on the top of the bureau and went into the bathroom to get a towel. There was a great deal of blood on the body and also on Kelly's hands. Kelly had shot him in tie heart, and the force of the blow had killed Parson instantly. Kelly had used his own Colt.38 Detective Special, loaded with those special high-muzzle-velocity and high-depth penetrating cartridges.

When Kelly came out of the bathroom, he was wiping himself thoroughly and glancing at his wristwatch.

"Wallet," I said. I was going through the papers. "Barry Parson, it says."

"Strictly cover," Kelly murmured, coming over and standing beside me, watching. "Somebody did a good job."

"The papers? You think it was MI-5?"

Kelly shook his head. "Told you we had contacted the British. They didn't affirm his identity."

"Yes, but…"

"When the British do not affirm, the British deny. You see?"

I continued through the credit cards and the passport. I glanced over the passport, but Kelly shook his head. "Forget that. That's cover, too."

"It looks like the real thing"

"You can get a good set of papers made in Portugal if you have the money to pay for it. Including the finest passport counterfeit on the Continent. There are hundreds of fake identity sets roaming around Europe — all Made in Lisbon."

I sifted through the papers thoughtfully. "Does it smell governmental?"